We elect politicians to make decisions. We have no say in a bunch unknown citizens picked at random. The bunch of nobodies in SA said nayy to a nuclear waste facility, and a weak Labor government buckled. The current Liberal government has decided that there will be a facility at Kimba. That's the way it should be.

As always anti-nuclear advocates and coal company stooges will argue against nuclear and from a very broad spectrum of ignorance and unfounded fear!

liberally sprinkled with mountains of misinformation and weaponised BS writ large. Will attempt to come across with concerns and always, always repeat Chernobyl and Fukushima as if they understood anything whatsoever about nuclear energy!

And any citizen's Jury is sure to be stacked with their ANTI-NUCLEAR numbers, each confirming the bias of their ilk! Just so a gutless and equally ignorant premier can tell her coal-fired compatriots

Well, we asked a people's panel and they shot it down in flames!

I would ask that any anti-nuclear advocate be not included just a bunch of folk with actual knowledge, that, e.g. for every gigawatt, nuclear energy has the lowest death toll and lower than even renewables!!

Even so, would not recommend conventional nuclear power, given prohibitive build costs and even more prohibitive enriched fuel costs aand the possibility of accidents when one is dealing with a pressurised reaction vessel, operating at 150 atmospheres!

We should be looking at WALK AWAY SAFE MSR (molten salt reactor) and thorium. Thorium is less radioactive than a banana. 8 grams of thorium contains enough energy to power your house and car for 100 years!

And it's this potential that has the 3 trillion dollars a year fossil fuel industry and their stooges, trembling with unmitigated rage as they see their rivers of gold being removed by a carbon-free alternative they could never ever compete with! Ditto equally terrified big nuclear! TBC.
Alan B.

When you get that just 8 grams of thorium contains enough energy to power your house and car for 100 years, is so abundant we can never run out of it.

Understand that the half-life of thorium is 15 billion years and that the projected life of the universe is 13.5 billion years and the reason we can never run out of thorium.

Uranium, on the other hand, has a half-life of 5 billion years and will be gone before the universe ends!

Also, understand this, the longer the half-life, the less radioactive the material! Some xenon e.g. has a half-life longer than the universe or thorium and therefore not very radioactive at all! And used routinely in nuclear medicine to assist with lung and brain scans.

Thorium is fertile and therefore cannot be compressed to create a thermonuclear explosion. And needs to spend a fortnight in the blanket of a conventional reactor (Lucas heights) to convert it to U233 which is fissile!

U233 can be used and used and used time and again in an unpressurised molten salt reactor where the immediately adjacent reprocessing facility allows further reactor energy depletion until every available erg of energy is extracted.

The remaining depleted material eminently suitable as long life space batteries and now in critically short supply around the globe as is another decay byproduct of U233, Miracle cancer cure, alpha particle isotope, bismuth 213!

A citizen's jury? Well, why not get a bunch of blind folks and ask them to evaluate sight? TBC.
Alan B.

London to a brick the "Jury" will consist of a few nuclear physicists who know SFA about thorium and will all have pet barrows to push. May know about the study of hormesis that shows communities exposed to higher than background radiation (double) have far fewer health issues!

Others will come from a very vociferous green movement, who to a generic man will know less?

But come with a shipload of unfounded fear and know all the ( vested interest) reasons we should be saddled with their prefered, more expensive renewables with battery backup.

And demand we just use less energy as their preferred stack and rack preferred solution.

Would import all our food and sell off all our intellectual property and homegrown innovation? Then just print money to pay all our bills?

The "Jury" should have at least one expert on thorium on it, someone who has spent over five years studying it. I mean anyone can read a book then pretend to be fully informed? Like the antinuclear (over my dead body) author?

If the Jury is just another delay the inevitable strategy? Or its recommendations are like so many other enquires, just pigeon-holed to gather dust, it'd be just another time and money-wasting exercise by a government trying to look like they're listening, considering all the carbon-free options? WTFing L is the point!?

Q: When is the best time to plant a tree?
A: Twenty years ago.

If something we need now is going o require a twenty-year lead time and R+D, should we then defer making a decision to deploy some prototypes for another twenty years, when all the opportunities that now beckon including the annual billions we could safely and sensibly earn as the world's safest nuclear waste repository!

On the clear-sighted understanding that in MSR, nuclear waste is simply unspent fuel!

Time we took charge of our own destiny, rather than, price gouging, tax-avoiding, debt-laden, profit repatriating foreigners

In the last analysis, a good businessman/leader, knows when to cut the losses and get out!
Alan B.

The author had already decided his answer before hearing anything. He closed his mind to any evidence in favour and stuck with his "set in concrete" mind set. Then he rubbished everyone around him.
A perfect example of why this process would not work.
Leaders should lead although against me is the evidence that we are swopping a cheap and reliable power supply for a very expensive and unreliable power supply. Add to this further disruption to transport making it all much more expensive and unreliable. Good news is it is only us Western idiots! The rest of the world will adopt what we have shown them works best!

A lot of closed minds in the space JB. Other so open their brains fall out?

Others have decided long before any of the alternatives were ever considered that it had to be coal, it just had to be coal. Others welded to their ( vested interest) solar voltaic and battery backup.


And only economic if at all, due to current price gouging by privatised or corporatised power! Both of who would be forced to fold up the tent and move on if MSR thorium and consequent power prices came in at under 3 cents PKWH!

3 cents PKWH? How is that possible?

Well if the wholesale price of current nuclear power is 12 cents PKWH and a hugely expensive 350 MW reactor housed inside an inordinately expensive hardened building burning fuel that's as rare as platinum.

Requires 2551 tons of enriched fuel during a thirty-year operational lifetime. And produce as much as 2550 tons of nuclear waste.

Whereas MSR thorium, say a rejigged NON-PRESSURISED FUJI 350 MW, will rf four times more abundant fuel and require over the same time scale just one ton of four times more abundant fuel

And build costs just a fraction of that required for an equivalent coal-fired power station. That's how!

As for coal mining jobs? They will be lost to automation inside a decade, Some coal mining robots are already deployed to cut cost and remove humans from unsafe/hazardous workplaces.

I speak as a former power company employee, employed as a science assistant. Have also be employed underground, as an assayer/lab technician and as an industrial chemist. And would have handled radioactive material on a routinely daily basis.

So, am talking through a hole in my face not from far lower down as I suspect is where the anti-nuclear Author is speaking from? TBC.
Alan B.

Apologies for the Grammarly auto-correct Which continues to F up my work shifting half-completed printed text into previously printed text.

And sometimes scrubs words so Burning is seen a bf? One of these days will not correct Grammarly's auto-correct so the world can see what elder/disabled abusive Bar Stewards they and their marketing program are?

Under no circumstances allow this allegedly free program inside your computer!

But I digress, Those concerned about our current coal oil and gas sales/ exports? Need to understand all our current energy exports and then some can be replaced by reticulated electricity sales from power generated here in waste burning MSR. And reticulated to all points via graphene cored undersea cables!

Yes, I know it requires bigger thinkers than those troglodytes we're currently saddled with and to a generic man know all the reasons it can't be done/won't work!

Can't died in a cornfield over a century ago! But his close cousin, won't is alive and well and is firmly anchored against both modernisation or change for the better! TBC.
Alan B.

Nuclear energy as MSR ( molten salt reactor) Would enable us to do many things we can't do now. Enable fresh food to be first vacuum-sealed then pasted through a radioactive space. The reactor blanket, to kill all pathogens and bacteria.

Meaning, as long as the seal was unbroken the food would remain as fresh and nutritious as the day it was sealed And as uncooked unfrozen food!

Imagine how many refrigeration free markets that would open and how well we could iron out, feast or famine production.

Imagine biting into a perfectly fresh crisp crunchy apple, e.g. 5-10 years after picking and knowing it was as safe as! Ditto all other fresh food and meat products!

Imagine deionisation dialysis desalination four times cheaper than current desal and cost-effective broad-scale agriculture with this much cheaper inexhaustible water! Imagine the energy needed to make it was 8 times cheaper at least than current coal-fired power!

Imagine being able to turn seawater into all manner of fuel and fertilizer or biodegradable plastic, using field trialled successful science and spare nuclear power.

Imagine steel and aluminium smelting that uses arc furnaces and hydrogen harvested directly fro seawater, via the water molecule cracking method, to make metal with no carbon footprint whatsoever and at prices, none can match!

Building a few dozen mass-produced factory assembled reactors with other folk's money and their donated free fuel, is just the tip of a very big economic iceberg waiting for us to grasp our opportunity by the horns and just stop with the endless prevarication/politically motivated BS. And just get on with it!

IT WILL NEVER EVER GET ANY CHEAPER OR EASIER WITH DELAY OR TIME!
ALAN B.

Oh Dear :(

This is another thread thoroughly Alan B.'d

OLO's own Strange Lover of nuclear reactors for everyone http://youtu.be/8XZyjp8uTJk?t=4m27s

Could a casual attitude to nuclear reactors in any decent sized town/city lead to some unintended accidents?

or have vie found zie perfectly safe machine, Mein Führer?

As attested by many experts in the field of science, walk away safe, Pete.

I get that neither you nor Ior any rational Australian wants a Chernobyl or Fukushima in their backyard.

MSR thorium is nothing at all like either of those examples. Loss of power for any reason and the reactor automatically shuts down and the molten material self drains into a purpose-built tank below the reactor.

Rouge emission prevented by a surrounding water jacket and the whole thing encased inside a concrete cube.

Seriously, background radiation would be far higher!

A very profitable spin-off would be the byproduct production of copious and virtually free bismuth 213.

Which would enable quite substantial medical tourism in rural and regional Australia by currently terminally ill cancer patients, many of who would leave our shore after a couple of weeks in complete remission!

I get by your deliberately extraordinarily and unnecessary rude characterisation of me, that you don't want that!? Want to see currently incurable brain and ovarian cancers that individually are higher P.A., than the annual road toll! Just continue to take life often very prematurely!

I get in your ultra ignorant commentary you just don't give a rat's about hundreds or thousands of terminally ill Australians, many of who could obtain a remission from virtually free, alpha particle bismuth 213.

I mean, MSR thorium may hurt your bottom line/vested interest!?

Read, Thorium, Super Fuel, by prize-winning, investigative journalist and science writer, Richard Martin. And Thorium cheaper than coal by ivy league professor and economist, Robert Hargraves (ret)

Take butchers at Engineer, Jam Petersen's presentation and or, NASA and nuclear technologist, Kirk Sorsens presentations on google tech talks. Start with thorium in four minutes to get the basics.
Alan B.

Bugger "citizens juries" which can be shaped by the organisers to comply with any wacky proposal going. With Australia now another almost ungovernable multicultural craphole beset by competing tribes, races, and religions, and with both sides of Parliament terrified of offending some tiny minority which could lose them power, about the only way the people of this country can govern ourselves now is with referenda's.

How about referenda's on the death penalty, banning Islamic immigration, reinstituting the white Australia Policy, building dams, nuclear power stations, capturing water from monsoonal areas of Australia and diverting it inland, divesting ourselves of any legislation giving international bodies any say in how Australia manges it's resources, divesting ourselves of any legislation giving international bodies any say in the creation of our laws, stop giving away billions every year in foreign aid when we are $600 billion in dept and have to borrow the money to give it away.

Amen to that LEGO

Our houses of Parliament and Referenda should not give way to a hoi polloi of "special" minority "voices" called citizens juries.

Sing it Navy http://youtu.be/akbzRuZmqVM?t=48s

Alan, this kills your pipe dream, uneconomic, silly MSR Thorium power. Read it and weep, http://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2010-9

Your entire justification and belief is predicated on far too many societal changes, i.e. cooperative government free of vested interests, a general population which is engaged in political and economic development and most importantly a population which is not apathetic, hubristic and one which genuinely gives two hoots about what you inanely bang on about, much to the annoyance of most readers of the comments section.

Try a reboot of your brain and accept your dream will never come to fruition.
Galen

Thanks for that Galen. And your accurate assessment of my, couldn't give a rat's, fellow Australians! And that they are almost to a man, pissed by the facts!

Won't even bother to look at the authors I've suggested or even thorium in four minutes? That much (four minutes) intellectual effort will fry their brains?

Afraid as they should be that the sky will fall if we transition away from coal to safer, cleaner, nuclear and resulting in less fatalities per gigawatt than any other source of energy!

It's only a question of time before we won't be able to give away coal!

And if we accept renewables or pie in the sky outcomes like carbon geosequestration or the still unattainable on any economic grounds, the mythical hydrogen economy! We could b still trying to make it work when we follow the Titanic, economically speaking!

Does anyone who understands economics, seriously believe we can have a robust and competitive manufacturing economy or even a steel or aluminium smelting industry if we transition to battery-backed renewables? Anybody!?

Or consider based on hard evidence from a reasonably lengthy trail, that 350 MW MSR thorium will require just one ton of Thorium during a 30 year, operational lifetime. And produce just 1% as waste at the end. Waste which is eminently suitable as long life space batteries that burn up with reentry.

Yes, this transition to a nuclear power will cost over a trillion! But will create thousands of new jobs during the construction phase. And thousands of permanent more in high tech manufacturing further down the track. And more than repay a trillion-dollar outlay. Moreover, money has never been cheaper!

The cost of inaction and then hitting the carbon-neutral panic button twenty-thirty years from now will be far greater and lead to a downturn worse in every way economically, than the Great Depression!

Whereas a conventional 350 MW reactor will require 2551 tons and create as much as 2550 tons of waste!

Thorium delivers everything fusion promised but could never ever deliver! TBC.
Alan B.

Alan, I agree with you regarding the pollies and our disengaged populous.

The link I included previously is a game changer

It will kill nuclear when scaled up, that’s if the ‘powers that be’ don’t kill it, which they always try to do when it’s not in their greedy interest.

Read the link it’s a defining event and could change the world.
Galen

Those who believe that tried tested and proven MSR in any way resembles conventional nuclear power will probably think an electric car will need spark plugs and a fuel pump, that's how stark is the difference between two very different nuclear technologies.

AS for electric vehicles, Graphene highways that, #1/ replace transmission towers and millions of miles of wires. Will #2/ Allow electric vehicles to be recharged as they travel, indefinitely.

Hydrogen can be used instead of coal in metals smelting and easily made by cracking the water molecule and from inexhaustible seawater! This same hydrogen will need the flameless heat of a nuclear reactor in the production process. Again old technology revisited and modernised.

Gas turbines will run as well if not better, on manufactured hydrogen. Ships running on MSR thorium, will never ever need to refuel for around thirty years and be far, far cheaper and safer to run than any diesel variant! Will likely be all far more efficient roll on roll off ferries and submersible to adapt to increased extreme weather and storm ferocity!?

Take butchers at thorium in four minutes rather than fake links manufactured in Moscow or St. Petersberg?
Alan B.

You kid yourself Alan.

When the lights go out, the fridge doesn't work, & people can't cook their food, because the electric stove doesn't work. people will accept nuclear, but only if it really is cheap enough to compete with coal. Otherwise they will demand coal fired power & chuck out ant politicians who won't give it to them.

Hell they might even start importing yellow vests from France.

Absolutely agree, Hasbeen, and right on the money!

Alvin Weinberg, inventor and patent holder of the first operational reactor got it almost immediately! When he was offered the head Honcho post at Oak Ridge and the world's first operational Molten salt reactor, that reused and reused thorium>U233 that was reprocessed and reprocessed onsite.

It's from Alvin's (about to be destroyed) rescued extremely notes that we can extrapolate the amount of thorium one would need to use in unpressurised MSR. And that it is far cheaper (3cents PKWH) as a walk away safe energy option than Malcolm Turnbull's solar voltaic and battery back up.

Before you treble the costs with battery back up, the lowest costing solar voltaic energy in the world in daylight hours only. Was 5 cents PKWH! Cheaper than NG!

And even then required massive economies of scale, by the Arab Emirates who built it.

Malcolm keeps repeating his assertions, I believe, because he has skin in the game?

People need to look at factual, on the ground, history before rushing to judgement with only bogus links produced in Moscow or St. Petersberg as their only (the sky will fall) "evidence"?

I hope a much more pragmatic market relying on forensically examined scientific and proven discovery rather than the mischief emanating from OPEC, (weaponised fossil fuel) is what will decide on outcomes/proven science? From operational examples!

Rather than conflicted entities worried solely about their rivers of gold/weaponised fossil fuel ONLY and the devil take the planet our kids, Grandkids or western economies!

Understand, one in three of us will be impacted by cancer during our lifetimes! You, your family, me, mine?

Agree, only fools led by fools are going to effectively turn their backs on, miracle cancer cure, bismuth 213 or the world's cheapest energy, as nuclear waste burning, WALK AWAY SAFE, CARBON FREE, MSR!

Thanks for adding a little ( the market will decide) sanity to the (the sky will fall) debate.
Alan B.